The Importance of Market Research

Market research is essential to discovering the viability of your product or service and your target market’s thoughts and feelings.

Market research should be the key pillar in deciding the viability in your in your idea or service.

It should be this way because if you decide to put your whole heart and savings into a product is not be greeted favorably by the market. Market research is the set of techniques and principles for systematically collecting, recording, analyzing, and interpreting data to aid marketing decisions. This process can really impact your decision-making and even the profitability of your new idea. There are four major steps that I am going to review today that will help you conduct your market research to be beneficial to your organization’s overall goals.

Stage 1: Determine the Research Problem- in this stage you will identify and clarify the information needs, define the research problems and questions, while also specify the research objectives. The question that should be answered in this step are: “What do you want to accomplish by this research?”

Stage 2: Select the Research Design- determine the research design and data sources, develop the sampling design and size, examine measurement issues and scales, design and pretest the questionnaire. Questions that should be answered in this step are: “Where am I going to test it?” “How many people are going to be apart of this process” “What process am I going to use to collect my data?”

Stage 3: Execute the Research Design- collect and prepare the data, analyze the data, and interpret the data in this stage to prepare for the fourth and final stage. Questions that should be answered in this stage are “How many people do we have recorded feeling this way towards the subject?” “Why did they answer this way?” “How does this impact us?”

Stage 4: Communicate the Research Results- we would have nothing if we didn’t learn from and explain our research to our colleagues and peers. In this final stage you need to prepare and present the final report to aid in the decision making process of your organization. This report will include your hypothesis (what you thought you would find out in your research), how the survey was conducted, what was found and if it supported your hypothesis or not and how it can be used to tell you more about the object of the study.

By executing these four steps in your research you can be assured that you will have meaningful data that will aid in your process and overall prove more beneficial to the future of your organization.

Written by Garnett Bruce, Team Member of SuccessfulWomenMadeHere.com – Garnett is a senior at Butler University studying marketing and strategic communication who seeks to constantly learn and evolve. Reprint allowed if including author credit.